It's not that simple. Ah! That phrase is Male for 'I'm afraid to.' - Karl Schroeder

What’s real is what’s valuable. Everything else is just an illusion.

In the end, her written ideology, the philosophy and new morals she had preached, were all means to an end. That end could never be reached; Armiger had taught her that. If so, then what mattered their disappointment, their disillusionment? They would hate her for leaving them alive, but they would be alive, and a life lived in bitterness was still better than a death colored by useless fanaticism.

Technologies are control systems, she said. They dictate your reality.